Memorial Cup: Duclair Shows Up to End Rimouski’s Season

The Rimouski Oceanic and Quebec Remparts met up for the second night in a row. The game was dubbed as “Tie Break Thursday”.  After the round robin completed on Wednesday night, the Remparts and Oceanic were left with only a win each, thus a tiebreaker was necessary. With a decisive 5-2 victory, the Quebec Remparts play the Kelowna Rockets tonight.

After redeeming himself on Wednesday night by shutting the Remparts out, Philippe Desrosiers looked to replicate that performance again on Thursday evening. Unfortunately, Desrosiers was in for a rough night making 26 saves on 31 shots.

The Quebec Remparts leaders showed up in fine form in their biggest game of the season. Assistant captains, Adam Erne and Ryan Graves along with captain, Kurt Etchegary tallied two points each.

Samuel Morin and Jeremy Lepine concluded their 2014-15 season with the only two goals for Rimouski.

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This time the Memorial Cup tournament hosts opened up scoring in the first period when Ryan Graves unloaded a canon of a shot on their third powerplay chance of the period, which was deflected in by Jerome Verrier.

In the second period the Oceanic were quick to even up the game at one when Samuel Morin  fired a slapshot past Zachary Fucale.

Quebec quickly took the lead when Anthony Duclair finally scored a goal, breaking a 4 game goalless drought.

In the last 5 minutes of the second period, excitement built up when Rimouski’s Jeremy Lepine knotted the game up at 2. Not even a minute later, Adam Erne  gave the home team the lead after Philippe Desrosiers misplayed the puck. Quebec scored again before time ran out in the second period, when Jerome Verrier scored his second of the game.

At 11:31 in the third period, Ryan Graves notched his second assist as Marc-Olivier Roy cut in on a defender and scored on a gritty rebound effort to put the game away.

This was a big win for Zach Fucale. Fucale was panned by Sportsnet’s Gare Joyce after the Wednesday night’s loss but he responded well on Thursday night. Fucale stopped 30 of 32 shots in his 8th career Memorial Cup game.

In attendance, a small but very loud crowd of 6,533 showed up to the Pepsi Coliseum to cheer the hometown Remparts to their biggest victory of the season.

The Quebec Remparts play against the Kelowna Rockets tonight at 7:30 EST. These two teams met in the Memorial Cup tournament opener, where the Remparts defeated the Rockets 4-3.